Fraudulent Firing (by Paul Rogat Loeb for TomPaine.com)

Fraudelent Firing
Paul Rogat Loeb
March 15, 2007



Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. See www.paulloeb.org. To receive his monthly articles email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.

They just wanted to protect the sanctity of the vote. That’s the administration’s pious explanation for why they fired eight U.S. Attorneys who were Republican enough for Bush to have appointed them in the first place. "The president recalls hearing complaints about election fraud not being vigorously prosecuted and believes he may have informally mentioned it to the attorney general,” explained White House spokeswoman Dana Perino. How could you question such a laudable goal?

Of course the justifications keep shifting, as with the Iraqi war. First it was the general performance of the prosecutors. Then a preference for specific replacements. Now it’s concern for the democratic process.

But the administration and its allies have a long history of using the specter of election fraud to justify reprehensible actions. In 2000, Jeb Bush claimed to be fighting potential fraud when he purged over 55,000 voters from the Florida rolls for felony convictions that under law should have had their voting rights restored—or that never had them revoked to begin with. Some simply had names similar to that of a convicted felon. Staffers of ChoicePoint, the Republican-tied data-collection firm that handled this effort, acknowledged that they disproportionately targeted low-income Democrats, particularly African Americans. A follow-up by BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast found that 90 percent of those scrubbed were legitimate voters, enough by far to have made Al Gore the winner. And the Supreme Court that handed Bush the presidency was led by William Rehnquist, who got his start harassing black and Hispanic voters in South Phoenix as part of a Republican effort called Operation Eagle Eye.

Election fraud was also the watchword in 2004. Ohio Secretary of State (and Bush campaign chair) Ken Blackwell claimed he was just protecting the legitimacy of the vote when heknocked 300,000 voters off the rolls in key Democratic cities like Cleveland, far exceeding Bush’s margin of victory. Blackwell also tried to reject new Democratic registrations because an arcane law said they were supposed to be on 80-pound paper stock (presumably more secure), then had to back off when his own official forms failed the same criterion. And he went to court to ensure that provisional ballots would be considered only if cast in the right precinct, defeating their key purpose, even as he sowed voter confusion by pulling machines and closing down polling stations in longstanding Democratic neighborhoods. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/03/15/fraudelent_firing.php